FreshEd

Today we discuss human rights education with Monisha Bajaj. Monisha, has recently edited a book entitled Human Rights Education: Theory, Research Praxis, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of human rights education, its diverse range of practices, and the ways it has changed overtime. We also discuss the challenges to Human Rights Education today. Monisha Bajaj is a professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. Check out www.freshedpodcast.com

What’s the relationship between test scores and gross domestic product? Do higher test scores lead to higher GDP? This question may seem a bit strange because most people think about the value of education on a much smaller, less abstract scale, usually in terms of “my children” or “my education.” Will my children earn a higher wage in the future if they do well on school examinations today? If I major in engineering, will I earn a higher income than if I majored in English? The answer to these question is usually assumed to be a resounding “yes.” Doing better on examinations or studying subjects that are perceived to be more valuable will result in higher wages at the individual level and higher GDP at the national level. Such a belief shapes educational policies and influences educational decision making by families. It has even resulted in a global private tutoring industry that prepares students for tests in hopes of getting ahead. But what if this assumption isn’t true? What if the relationship between test scores and GDP isn’t so straightforward? With me today are Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye. Recently they have been publishing numerous articles (see here, here, and here) challenging the statistical research supporting the conclusion that higher tests scores cause higher GDPs. Instead, they find that test scores don’t determine GDP by all that much. Hikaru and Jeremy were kind enough to give FreshEd a graph showing their results. You can find it on FreshEdpodcast.com. Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye are based at the Graduate School of Education at Kyoto University. Their most recent op-ed appeared in the Washington Post.

I hated tests growing up. They made me feel physically ill. But we aren’t going to look at the types of tests I disliked so much, those given by a teacher to her or his students. We aren’t even going to look at standardized tests administered across one country. Instead, today’s show focuses on tests that are administered around the world. We call these types of tests international large-scale assessments. One of the most popular today is called PISA — the Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA tests 15-year-old’s scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading. The latest test, in 2015, was administered in 72 countries. Think for a moment of how complex it must be to create, administer, and interpret PISA across 72 countries. The test must be reliable in different contexts; it must successfully recruit national government officials to help collect data; and it must rely on a small army of statisticians to discern what the test results actually mean. For many, the benefit of a test like PISA is that it allows governments to make evidence based policy. After learning where its students sit globally, education officials from one country can enact new and hopefully better policies to improve student learning. Sounds good, right? But that’s the whole story. Cross-national assessments have produced countless controversies — some within specific countries and others in the academic literature. With me today is Gustavo Fischman. He’s been studying this subject for some time. In November 2016, he helped organize a symposium at Arizona State University looking at these so-called “global learning metrics.” You might remember a few FreshEd podcasts on the subject. He has also recently co-written a working paper for the Open Society Foundation on the topic, which will be released later this year. Gustavo Fischman is a professor of educational policy and director of edXchange the knowledge mobilization initiative at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

Have you ever visited schools like Eton College in the United Kingdom, St. Albans in the United States, or Geelong Grammar School in Australia? Maybe you were among the lucky few to have attended one. These schools are primarily reserved for children from the most privileged families, members of the 1 percent, as we would say today. The schools are steeped in tradition, covered in oak and ivy, and cost a small fortune to attend. The fees at St. Albans, for instance, run as high as $58,000 USD. For that price, it’s no wonder that these schools offer some of the best education money can buy and have produced some notable graduates. For instance, 19 prime ministers from the UK attended Eaton. Talk about a small circle! These schools, which are found worldwide, produce and sustain social class and have had to adapt to changing global and local circumstances over the decades. Many started as all boy’s schools but have since become co-educational. Others were reserved for national elites to produce competent colonial administrators but have since turned their attend to the growing market of international students. My guest today, Debbie Epstein, has been part of a research team exploring elite schools in former British colonies, from Australia to Barbados and Hong Kong to India. The team, comprised of Jane Kenway, Johannah Fahey, Debbie Epstein, Aaron Koh, Cameron McCarthy, and Fazal Rizvi, have recently co-written a book on their findings entitled “Class Choreographies: Elite schools and globalization.” Debbie, a Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of a Roehampton, joined me to talk about some of the major themes explored in the book.

Can education be used to create peace? Can it help mend long standing issues in conflict afflicted regions? These questions don’t have easy answers, but we’ll jump into the debates surrounding them feet first. My guests today, Mieke Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah, have been studying education, social transformations, and peacebuilding for the past decade and have worked and written together since 2011. They find that education has the capacity for both positive and negative outcomes. Education can certainly help resolve conflict by creating community and giving voice to under-represented groups in society. However, education can also be used as tool by ruling elites as a way to maintain their grip on power, which may sow further divisions in society. Think of it this way: imagine if a ruling party in a country decides to censor content from history textbooks that may question its power. Would that really create the conditions under which peace is possible? Or imagine if minority groups are purposefully excluded from school-based decisions. How can peace be sustainable if the structures of education systematically exclude certain people? These issues are not strange or reserved for “poor” or “developing” countries. In fact, the politics of education happens in every country. With me to talk about peacebuilding and education are Mieke Lopes Cardozo and Ritesh Shah. Mieke is assistant professor in International Development Studies at the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam, and Ritesh is a Senior Lecturer of Comparative and International Education at the University of Auckland.

One of the primary goals of education is to prepare youth for the labor market. This task is infinitely difficult because economies are constantly changing. What will the global labor market look like in 30 years and how will it impact specific countries? It’s impossible to know for sure, which therefore makes deciding which skills to teach inside national school systems difficult to pinpoint. It’s a major public policy question facing many governments. But there are some skills that employers want right now that they feel schools are not teaching. Plus, with the labor movement in decline worldwide, jobs have become precarious for many people. This reality requires laborers to have the grit and tenacity to be flexible in their job choices as economies change. Can schools teach these soft-skills to students? My guests today have recently co-edited a book that dives into the subject, looking at the skills deemed necessary by employers but lacking in students. The book is entitled “Bridging the Skills Gap: Innovations in Africa and Asia, which was published by Springer earlier this year. With me today are two of the co-editors, Wambui Munge and Shubha Jayaram. Wambui is a Communications Officer at Results For Development where Shubha is a Senior Program Officer.

For the past few years, the Globalization and Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society has hosted an annual keynote address focused on cutting edge issues in the study of globalization and education. In early March at the CIES conference held in Atlanta, Fazal Rizvi gave the annual address. Fazal Rizvi is a well-known and prolific scholar on issues related to globalization, and was one of the first guests on FreshEd in 2015. He is a Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, where he joined in 2010 after being based at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he directed the Global Studies in Education program. Along with Professor Bob Lingard, who also joined FreshEd, Fazal is the author of a widely-read book, Globalizing Education Policy. His keynote address was entitled “Globalization and education after Trump and Brexit”. Following his remarks, we will hear a few words from Dr. Mario Novelli, who is Professor of Political Economy of Education at the University of Sussex. Enjoy the hour-long address!

The field of Global Studies has a similar historical trajectory as the field of comparative education. Both fields in the American context were formalized in the 1950s during the Cold War and expanded in the 1980s when scholars “began to take note of the rapidly increasing transnational flows of people, ideas, and products, and the social, political, economic, and cultural consequences of these trends.” Both also lack a clear disciplinary home. Scholars bring myriad academic perspectives to each field, from economics to sociology and from history to anthropology. So today we explore global studies in depth in an effort for mutual learning. With me today is a leading scholar of global studies, Hilary Kahn. Hilary Kahn is the assistant dean for international education and global initiatives and director of the Center for the Study of Global Change in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. She is a co-director of the Framing the Global project, which is trying to “develop and disseminate new knowledge, approaches, and methods in the field of global research.” She co-edited a book entitled Framing the Global: Entry points for research that I think could be valuable to comparative education researchers.

Rwanda is perhaps most well-known for the genocide it experienced in the 1990s. In its post-conflict development, the country has had to balance colonial legacies, state centralizing tendencies, and the zeitgeist of neoliberalism. This has made for a careful balancing — one that has left the government regulating the society and economy while simultaneously reducing its responsibility to citizens. In education, this balancing act manifests in the government’s three aims: credentials, controls, and creativity. The education system is based on credentials awarded through examinations, a colonial hangover, and controls students as part of the state’s centralization efforts; yet, somehow, the system promotes creativity so students can pursue a learner-centered education tailored to their own needs, preparing them for the 21st century labor market of precarious work. My guest today, Catherine Honeyman, has a new book that explores Rwanda’s opportunities, challenges, and paradoxes in post-conflict development through the policy of mandatory entrepreneurship education, which is believed to be the country’s beacon for economic growth. Catherine Honeyman is a visiting scholar at the Duke Center for International Development and Managing Director of Ishya Consulting. Her new book, The Orderly Entrepreneur, takes us inside both policy making circles and classrooms to understand part of Rwanda’s social transformation. The Orderly Entrepreneur received an honorable mention from the Globalization and Education SIG’s 2016 Book Award.

The Globalization and Education Special Interest Group holds an annual book award to honor an outstanding book that addresses issues related to globalization and education. The 2016 award will be presented on March 8 to Toni Verger, Clara Fontdevila, and Adrian Zancajo for their book The privatization of education: A political economy of global education reform, which was published by Teacher College Press. The award committee praised the book for its clear-eyed and theoretically-rich contribution to the larger debate on privatization and education in the context of global education reforms. I interviewed Toni Verger about the book last year, so will replay the episode in full today. If you happen to be attending the CIES conference in Atlanta this week, please attend the Globalization and Education SIG’s keynote address on March 8 where the book award will be presented. Toni Verger is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.